Thursday, January 19, 2012

The Brookings Institute recently released their 2011 Global MetroMonitor, which analyses the economic growth in the world’s 200 largest metropolitan economies (including five Brazilian metropolitan areas).

It looks pretty interesting. For instance, "ninety percent of the fastest-growing metropolitan economies among the 200 largest worldwide were located outside North America and Western Europe". More here and here.

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2011): World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision. New YorkNote: Only countries with a population of 100,000 or more in 2010 are included

I've read this book last year, but finally I stopped procrastinating got time to write a post about it.

It's a really interesting book, full of curiosities about traffic bevaiour flirting with sociology and economics. Here is the NYT's review

I selected four quotes that I would like to use as an epigraph:

"The problem, as is so often the case in traffic, is that the collective result of everyone’s smart behavior begins to seem, on a larger scale, stupid" p.149

“Traffic patterns are the desire lines of our everyday lives. They show us who we are and where we are going” p. 151

"Traffic is thus a living laboratory of human interaction, a place thriving with subtle displays of implied power. When a light turns green at an intersection, for example, and the car ahead of another driver has not moved, there is some chance that a horn will be sounded. But when that horn will be sounded, for how long and how many times it will be sounded, who will be sounding the horn, and who the horn will be sounded at are not entirely random variables." p.34

"If you look at trip rates by male versus female, and look at that by size of family…the women’s trip rates vary tremendously by size of family. Men’s trip rates look as if they didn’t even know they had a family. The men’s trip rates are almost independent of family size. What it obviously says is that the mother’s the one doing all the hauling." p.135

It seems to be the case of urban growth in Pittsburgh (increase in urban footprint with no increase in population. and Pittsburgh's economy is not that bad considering the USA context). But could it be more efficient and still make people’s lives better ? The sprawl debate still have a long way to go since it is not a straightforward issue.